Cooking with Linux - Jumbled Words

If the medium is the message, what happens if your understanding of the message rates only a medium?

What on earth are you doing, François? Our guests will be
here any moment. What are all these yellow sticky notes doing
everywhere? Quoi? You're preparing for the
telephony-themed
issue? Although I admire your desire to help, I confess that this time,
I really have no idea what you are doing. The telephone game? Of
course I know what the telephone game is. You tell one person a phrase,
he or she whispers it to another, who tells yet another, until you run out of
players. The last player repeats what he or she thinks the message is, and
it
invariably turns out to be something totally different from what was
originally selected. I still don't see what all these notes are for.

Ah, I see. They are anagrams, mostly of your first and last name,
it would appear. You've got it all mixed up, mon ami.
Anagrams,
or word scrambles, have nothing to do with the telephone game other than
that the message gets scrambled in some way. How many of these notes have
you got scattered around the restaurant anyway? Never mind. I don't want
to know. Our guests are approaching as we speak. We'll discuss this later.

Welcome, everyone, to Chez Marcel! Please take your
seats and make
yourselves comfortable. You may want to forgive the yellow notes all
over the walls. My faithful waiter has gone anagram-crazy, and what you see
is the result. François, if you would be so kind, please head down
to the wine cellar. Over in the west wing, there are a few cases of 2002
Bolgheri Rosso Piastraia from Tuscany. Please, fetch some for our guests.

While we await François' return with the wine, let me show you a
great little program for generating anagrams. Written by Richard Jones
(now maintained by Paul Martin), an is a
command-line program
designed to generate anagrams. The program is extremely easy to use, but
let me offer a quick word of caution. You'll want to use one or more of
an's command-line options as
it is extremely liberal
with the anagrams it returns, and you'll quickly drown in results. My
own name, Marcel Gagne, generates 837,989 results if I type
an "Marcel Gagne". Notice that when using two words,
I put
them in quotation marks. If you use the -w option,
an
generates a list of unique words instead of myriad phrases. Using my
name as the example, I get 318 words. Compare that to a return of
cam
an ger g l e followed by cam an erg g l
e and so on.

Increasingly interesting results turn up if you specify words of a
particular length. For instance, if you have ten letters to work with, and
you'd like to see words of six letters or more, use the -m
6
option, which stands for minimum word length of six. If you know that the
word mossy can be generated by the words you are using and you want
to see all the combinations of “lost mysteries” that include
mossy
and contain a minimum of four letters per word, you might try typing
the following:

an -m 4 -c mossy "lost mysteries"

A similar program is Evans A Criswell's Wordplay. Wordplay is
also a command-line program for generating anagrams. Unlike
an,
Wordplay generates less words by default, but it also is more likely to
generate meaningful results. There are command-line options to limit
the number of words or characters each word can have and so
on. Simply type wordplay at the command line for a
list of options.

You can waste an amazing amount of time using these simple command-line
anagram-generators and discover some fascinating things. For
instance, did you know that “red pestilence iota nil” is an
anagram
for “presidential election”? That's just silly, of course.
After all,
“lulu jar nixon” is an anagram for “Linux
Journal”. Then again, so is
“lunar join lux”. François! Thank goodness you have returned.
Please,
pour a rather large glass for each of our guests.

So, what's the point of all this? Well, anagrams can be a great
mental exercise, one that is a lot of fun. To that end, there are
a number of great games based on anagrams and word scrambles. One of
these is Joshua Keel's Kanagram (Figure 1).
Kanagram is not
only a great game, it's also a great place to start our exploration
of word scramble games. You shouldn't have any trouble getting your
hands on this one, as it is very likely in your distribution's software
repository. Kanagram presents you with a scrambled
word and asks you to
decipher the word. There's no ticking clock on this one, and you don't
get dinged for getting the word wrong. To make the choice of words
interesting, the game comes with a number of vocabularies. These are
word categories, such as Computers, Inventions, Sports, Professions
and so on. There also are generic vocabularies based on whether the
words are easy, medium or hard.

Figure 1. Kanagram turns
anagram generation into a stylish game.

On the left-hand side of Kanagram's window, there's a
large
blackboard with the scrambled letters in the center. On the top
right of the blackboard, the category is highlighted. You always
can switch to another category with a click of the mouse. If you know the
word, type it in the white input box below the blackboard. At any time,
you can ask for a little help by clicking the word hint on the
bottom left of the blackboard (Figure 2).

Figure 2. If you're
not ready to give up, but you need a hint, Kanagram
understands.

That brings us to Kanagram's right-hand side menu,
cleverly designed
to resemble a filing cabinet. If you do succumb to the pressure and need
a hint, it appears in a pop-up near the bottom of the cabinet. Scroll
your mouse pointer over the cabinet's drawers, and a tooltip describes
what you'll find inside. You can jump to the next anagram, configure
some of the program's functions, read the handbook or exit.

As I mentioned in the introduction to the game,
Kanagram comes with a
handful of vocabularies, but there are more available for download in a
number of different languages. Simply click the second file drawer to open
Kanagram's configuration dialog. You can look at
existing vocabularies
and create your own by clicking Vocabularies in the sidebar. To download
new vocabularies, click New Stuff instead (Figure 3).

Figure 3. List, create or download new vocabularies.

When you click the Download New Vocabularies button, a new window
appears showing what's available. You then can select and download
vocabularies that appeal to you.

If you could turn anagrams into an arcade game, it might look
something like Tom Bradley's Scramble (Figure 4).
There's
a ticking clock, fun sound effects and multiple levels that can
be reached only by making it past a certain percentage of the
words successfully. On the surface, it doesn't seem all that complicated. After
all, each scramble consists of a measly six letters (“six
letters” = “telex stirs”). When the letters appear on
the placards at the
bottom of the screen, click on the letters to form a word, then click
Submit (or if you prefer, type the word and press Enter). If
the word exists, it will load up one of the empty word boxes, after which
you can move on to the next word.

Figure 4. Scramble jumbles a mere six letters. Think
you can master it?

Strangely enough, getting from one level to the next isn't always as
easy as it looks. Sometimes, if you get really stuck, re-scrambling the
letters can help—for that reason, you'll find clicking Shuffle
every once in a while a handy thing. Did you, in a flash of brilliance,
figure out the six-letter word? If you can guess the six-letter word right
off the bat, you automatically move to the next level. Eventually,
when you have exhausted all possibilities and the timer runs out,
Scramble may deliver a classic arcade pat on the back.
Yes,
Scramble keeps track of high scores, and lets you
enter your name in the
high-scorers' list.

For the truly anagram-crazy, there's Colm Gallagher's
Anagramarama (Figure 5). It doesn't quite maintain the
arcade-like feel of Scramble, but it also doesn't
limit itself to
six letters. In that respect, it can be much more of a challenge,
particularly if you live for the thrill of building words from random
collections of letters.

Figure 5. Anagramarama—more letters mean more
words and more challenge.

When you click a letter from the top list of available letters, it
drops into the Guess box below. After you've assembled your word, or
something you think might qualify as a word, simply click the green check
mark. Keyboard racers may prefer to type the letters, entering an
anagrammatic stream of consciousness.

“I'm upset” is an anagram for “Time's up”, and
sadly, closing time
approaches. Don't be too upset though. I'm sure we can convince François
to refill our glasses a final time. And, while we sip our wine (“mute
sip” also is an anagram for “time's up”), we may
uncover some interesting
anagrams by putting in the names of friends, family members and, of
course, coworkers.

Raise your glasses, mes amis, and let us all drink to
one
another's health.
A votre santé! Bon appétit!

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